We know little about how social entrepreneurs try to induce enactment of their cause, especially when this cause is difficult to embrace. Through a longitudinal study, we analyze how anti-plastic pollution social entrepreneurs use multimodal (visual and verbal) interactions to influence their targets and promote their cause. Our findings reveal that these social entrepreneurs used what we call emotion-symbolic work, which involved using visuals and words to elicit negative emotions through moral shock, and then transforming those emotions into emotional energy for enactment. The emotional transformation process entailed connecting target actors to a cause, a collective identity and the social entrepreneurs themselves. The exploration of emotion-symbolic work offers new ways of seeing by emphasizing the use of multimodal interactions to affect emotions in efforts to influence target actors to enact a cause.

This paper examines the succession of formal and informal channels of university-industry knowledge transfer, and the local economic impact of their dynamic interaction. To do so, we investigate a highly cited university patent over an extended period of time through a case study methodology. Our work provides three fundamental insights. First, local economic impact can be achieved only after a complex, temporally unfolding sequence of interactions between formal and informal channels of knowledge transfer. Second, in the course of this dynamic interaction, knowledge generated during formal transfer activities may be transferred via informal channels. Third, the method developed can provide information on the variety of knowledge transfer channels related to highly cited patents.

Recent empirical findings have questioned the use of patent citations as a measure. This points to the need of validation of patent citations methodologies, which we address by testing a recent methodology for studying technological evolution, namely connectivity analysis of citation networks. We find connectivity analysis to be a valid tool to identify the reliable knowledge which opens the way to further technological evolution of a surgical prosthesis, the artificial spinal disc. We also illustrate how connectivity analysis represents how this reliable knowledge differs depending on the stage of technological evolution. The corroborated validity of connectivity analysis of patent citations may trigger a renaissance in the use of this kind of patent data.